Friday, October 22, 2004
True Lies
I tried to put this on the comments section but it's too long. I'm getting sick of the topic, but ok: here's John O'Neill on the Swift Boat Veterans website (check the "Quotes" page:
"We resent very deeply the false war crimes charges he made coming back from Vietnam in 1971 and repeated in the book "Tour of Duty."...We think that he knew he was lying when he made the charges, and we think that they're unsupportable. "
Now check this out. Can we agree that the site Dick Cheney recommended is going to be nonpartisan? Not all of this article is good for Kerry, by a long shot; he's conflicted, years later, about what he did as a young man. You can parse O'Neill's statement to make it not a lie, of course:
(Well, they only resent the "false" war crimes charges, not the true ones! He really does "think" that Kerry knew he was lying (when he made the "false" charges), so that's true, too!)
But if O'Neill really believes that Kerry's accounts of war crimes (for the most part, repeating other people's stories) are substantively different from what really happened in Vietnam, or that he made those stories up then he might not be lying but he's not that bright either.
And that page on swiftboatvets is full of people saying, in effect, that soldiers in Vietnam were all, except for Calley, honorable men who never got out of hand. That simply is not true, and to quote O'Neill, I think they knew that what they said wasn't true when they made the charges, and I think that they're unsupportable. In my book, that makes them liars.
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